


'cause I'm already gone

by jaythenerdkid



Category: The Mindy Project
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-24
Updated: 2014-04-24
Packaged: 2018-01-20 15:33:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1515674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jaythenerdkid/pseuds/jaythenerdkid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The silence stretches between them, and Danny sees the way things could go. Set at the end of <em>Be Cool</em>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	'cause I'm already gone

_"Why did you kiss me, Danny? Why did you even_ start _this?"_

He stops at the catch in her voice. She's looking at him with a mix of anger and despair and confusion in those big brown doe eyes and her mascara is starting to run a little, following the trails of her tears down her cheeks. She's panting a little and her chest is rising and falling in a way that he'd find hypnotically compelling at any other time and in any other situation, but right now it's just a reminder that the heart beating in there is breaking and it's all because of him.

Jesus Christ, he is the biggest bastard  _ever_ for doing this to her.

"Min, I..." he clears his throat because the next few words are sticking in there until he feels like he might choke on them. He clears his throat again and spits them out:

"I love you."

And now he's said the words and they're hanging in the air between the two of them and he can't ever, ever take them back.

She's still staring at him, but he thinks maybe there's a little less anger and despair and a little more confusion, which, if it isn't necessarily a good sign, at least can't be a bad one, right? The silence stretches between them, thick and syrupy and cloying like treacle, and he feels like he's going to suffocate in it soon if she doesn't say something,  _anything_ , to break it.

She looks down. He sees a tear fall and soak into the fabric of her sweater. Finally, she speaks, her voice as rough as if she's already been crying for days.

"How long?"

She says it so quietly and her voice is muffled beneath the fall of hair obscuring her face that he almost doesn't hear it over the sudden deafening rush of blood to his head. "Uh," he says, any semblance of eloquence deserting him (so much for little Shakespeare), "uh...how long what?"

"How long have you loved me?" He flinches at the way she spits the words out, like they've left a bitter taste in her mouth, but he knows he deserves it. He fidgets with the cuff of his shirt, wonders what to say, how honest to be. She looks back up, mascara streaked down her face, and he knows it's bad because she isn't even trying to wipe it away.

To hell with it. She deserves the truth, at least. "Since...since Haiti," he mumbles. Now he's the one who can't look at her - he stares down at the carpet as though a way of fixing this mess will spell itself out in the fibres. "When you got that stupid haircut," he continues. "Probably - I probably loved you before that, I don't know, I tried not to think about it, but that was the first time I remember knowing."

"And you let me fly off to  _another country_ knowing you were in love with me?" she asks incredulously.

He chances a glance at her face and she's stopped crying. She's looking at him expectantly now, and something in her eyes - is it hope? does he remember what hope looks like? - compels him to go on. "I didn't wanna get between you and another man, you know," he explains, knowing how stupid that sounds, given that this started with a kiss in the back of an aeroplane while she was trying to get her boyfriend back. "I thought - I wanted you to be happy. If you were gonna be happy with Casey, I didn't wanna ruin it."

"And after Casey?"

"There was always someone else. And - " he closes his eyes, clenches his jaw, swallows. "And I didn't have any way of knowing if you felt the same about me."

"So, to recap," Mindy says slowly, absent-mindedly fingering the hem of her sweater, "you've been in love with me since I was engaged to the guy before the guy before the guy before the guy you got me to break up with after we almost burned down a church during his grandmother's funeral? And you never thought of maybe, you know, _telling_ me?"

When it's put like that, he has to admit that it does sound kinda pathetic. He swallows again. "Uh - I guess, yeah," he replies, his voice cracking a little. "I guess that's it."

Mindy stares at him for a moment as though he's sprouted a second head, or maybe like there's a particularly weird-looking stain on his shirt. Then she collapses against the wall, laughing hysterically.

He's not sure what he was expecting, but it probably wasn't that.

"Min?" he asks, a little alarmed. "Min, are you...uh, Min?" He's debating whether or not he should go over to her, get her a drink of water or something, when her laughter dies down and she's staring up at him, panting a little (and there's that rise and fall of her chest again, and he only feels a  _little_ bad for noticing), with something almost like amusement writ on her face.

She shakes her head and slides back up the wall until she's on her feet. Her hair is a mess and her face is streaked with makeup and she is the most beautiful woman he has ever, _ever_ seen. She smiles crookedly. "Daniel Castellano," she says, and there's a note of fondness in her voice as she says it that sends a little shiver of warmth through him, "I'm sure I've told you this at least a million times and I will definitely tell you at least a million times more, but you are  _such_ an idiot."

He doesn't have a response to that. Sometimes a man's gotta know when to back down.

She shakes her head again. "I'm not going to hate you," she says softly. "I'm not going to leave. And I don't expect you to change two things or seven or twenty, though we do have to do something about your snoring because oh my god, how does one tiny man make so much noise, I swear that's against the laws of physics - "

" - Hey!"

She raises a finger and for once, he takes the hint and falls silent. "I am not going to stop loving you just because you're, well,  _you_ ," she says. "That's kind of why I love you in the first place, dummy."

He's about to object to being called 'dummy' when something clicks into place. "You...love me?" he asks, his voice almost a whimper.

"Well,  _duh_ ," she replies, rolling her eyes, and he can't stop a giant, foolish grin spreading across his face.

They stare at each other like that for a while, just grinning like teenagers in love for the first time, and he remembers what hope feels like.

"So...you wanna do this, huh?" he finally asks. He can feel his entire body trembling. She loves him.  _She loves him._ He wants to hear her say it over and over again forever just so he can be certain he's heard it right. _  
_

"Yeah, I wanna do this," she says, and she's striding towards him with the brightest smile on her face and Jesus, he owes God Mass every Sunday for the rest of his life because this, _this_ is heaven on Earth. He reaches for her, body already aching for the feel of her in his arms, and he thinks to himself that maybe, just maybe he won't fuck this up -

\- except that as he wraps his arms around her she's dissolving and the grin on her face is being replaced with a look of puzzlement and then fear and she's fading away and then she's gone and he realises that he's back where he was and everything's still fucked up and she's still looking at him from the doorway, tears falling softly down her cheeks.

He clears his throat again, determined to say the words, determined to make this right, but they're stuck in his throat again and this time he can't spit them out, can't do what he's meant to, can't fix this mess, can't fix anything.

_"I'm sorry," he says, hating himself. He turns away and walks out the door before the look on her face destroys him completely. (He's too late - it already has.)_

_In her apartment, Mindy collapses into her bed, sobbing bitterly._

_Outside her window, Danny resists the temptation to scream, to kick something, to do _anything_ to alleviate the heaviness suddenly constricting his chest, making it hard for him to breathe._

_He settles for refusing to cry._

**Author's Note:**

> One of these days, I'll write sappy, adorable Dandy fluff.
> 
> This is not that day.
> 
> Fic title is a lyric from Vienna by The Fray, one of the songs on my super-tragic Dandy breakup playlist.


End file.
